It's hard to put an exact date on when genre stopped being a good way of organising a record collection and started being a confusing mess of labels but it has happened. Maybe it's a younger man's nostalgia for the years before his birth that makes the heyday of rock and roll seem like a time that could have been understood more easily than the fractured 'blogosphere' and world-spanning scenes that a serious music fan has to deal with today. Hopefully it'll all make a lot more sense twenty or thirty years from now.
In the meantime, we're left with a situation where accurate genre labels are likely to be a specific description of one or two bands. Meursault have referred to themselves in interviews as 'epic lo-fi', bringing to mind The Microphones and Mount Eerie, and as genre-labels go it's pretty much on the money.
The epic is immediately clear; Neil Pennycook's voice tears through pretty much anything you could put in front of it. It's a powerful instrument, loud and melancholic, almost Celtic-sounding, and more than anything else it defines the band's sound; a longing-filled, soft then raging folk. Simple drum machines and synths bolster the otherwise acoustic instrumentation, adding rigidity and fire to songs like Crank Resolutions, one of the album's immediate standouts,
The songs on All Creatures Will Make Merry have been in the band's live set for a while and the transfer to record is striking. Live Pennycook's voice rings clear over the sound of the band, on record everything is buried under layers of distortion and fuzz. This noise, more smothering than abrasive, leaves him sounding like a man howling on some far-away hilltop, screaming in the rain. It's a really remarkable piece of production and gives the album a distinctive quality, at once both earthy like it's folk origins and all-encompassing, huge-sounding like the peak of a ten-minute post-rock opus.
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